Glitch affects ticket sales

Rocktober has swept Colorado, but more than 50,000 tickets remain unsold for the three World Series games that could be played between the Rockies and Boston Red Sox at Coors Field.

With the Rockies’ website under what team President Keli McGregor called “an external, malicious attack” Monday morning, the club was forced to temporarily suspend the sale of the tickets to its home games for the Series, which is being done exclusively online. The attack caused a system-wide outage for the Rockies’ Irvine-based online ticket vendor, Paciolan.

The Rockies will attempt to sell their tickets online again today, starting at 11 a.m. Pacific. Game 3, the first game of the Series that will be played in Denver, is scheduled for Saturday.

“Throughout the day we’ve evaluated all of our options, and we continue to believe that the online sale approach is the most fair and equitable method to distribute the tickets,” McGregor said. “Our partners at MLB.com and Paciolan have fully assessed the situation and assured us that [today’s] online sale will go as originally planned.”

Rockies spokesman Jay Alves referred questions about the attack to MLB.com and Paciolan. MLB.com would not comment on the matter, and repeated calls to Paciolan were not returned.

The tickets that hadn’t been sold to Rockies season-ticket holders went on sale exclusively on the team’s website, coloradorockies.com, at 9 a.m. Pacific, but fewer than 500 were sold before Paciolan’s system failed. The Rockies said their site had more than 8.5 million hits.

Among Paciolan’s 200-plus clients is USC, which was unable to sell tickets to athletic events for about an hour Monday morning. But the glitch was hardly noticed.

“We didn’t get any complaints from the public,” said Tim Tessalone, sports information director.

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dylan.hernandez@latimes.com